Tango

The current assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on either the photograph in the previous post or alternatively on a quotation from a Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
The quotation is "Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel at Androgué, among the effusive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors."

Tango

Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel at Androgué, among the effusive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. The hotel itself, like the station and the houses surrounding it, was imported wholesale from England during the boom of the late nineteenth century; the bathroom fittings and doorknobs, the mirrors and the honeysuckle, indeed the very bricks themselves, shipped the length of the Atlantic as the Great Empire turned its eye southward.

With them came Engineer Herbert Ashe, tasked with linking Buenos Aires to the vast and fertile cattle country of La Pampa and Rio Negro, and eventually to Rio Gallegos via La Trochita, the narrow gauge steam railway that a century hence was to achieve fame as The Old Patagonian Express.

Unlike the Scots and Irish labourers shipped over with them - who, on completion of the railway would become ranchers and leave a trail of Celtic names scattered across the pampas - the English engineers never intended to stay, least of all Engineer Herbert Ashe, whose limpid fiancée Daphne pined 'neath Lympne's bailey awaiting her consummation.

Engineer Herbert Ashe, however, would never return to the twin bosoms of Daphne and England. The telegram his distraught fiancée received informed her of his tragic death in a blasting accident on a Patagonian mountainside but delicately avoided the truth.

For Engineer Herbert Ashe had found himself one morning gazing into the illusory depths of those hotel mirrors, gratefully inhaling that effusive honeysuckle’s fragrance, when darting betwixt reflected vines he glimpsed a flash of eyes, a tremble of lace as black as the heart of darkness and was himself ensnared.
Unable, indeed unwilling to escape the mirror’s pull he stepped forward and found soft fingers stroking his own, enticing him deeper into lush foliage and heady aromas; on through verdant gardens she led him, ever on until at last the vibrant colours swirling around him resolved themselves into the streets of La Boca, the beating heart of Buenos Aires. La Boca: the Forbidden Quarter; rank with Criollo bordellos, replete with opium dens and, more seductive still, the sinuous rhythms of the Tango.

The authorities were never able satisfactorily to explain the presence of Engineer Herbert Ashe in a blood-filled bathtub on an upper floor of a dockside whorehouse in La Boca district, entwined as he was with the body of a beautiful Criollo prostitute, both of them naked and shot through the heart with the pistol that dangled still from the Englishman’s hand.
How could they know the pull of that rhythm, the allure of those kohl-rimmed eyes, the flashing scarlet of her lips, the whirlwind of lace as her hips ground against his to the breathless, frenzied strumming of guitars? How could they ever understand the intoxication of her perfume, the passion of her kisses, the wild ecstasy of endless nights in her arms?
How, in all honesty could he, Engineer Herbert Ashe, ever go back?

With Gods On My Side

This month's assignment was to write precisely 500 words based on either the following photograph or alternatively on a quotation from a Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
The quotation is "Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer for the Southern Railway Line, still lingers in the hotel at Androgué, among the effusive honeysuckle vines and in the illusory depths of the mirrors."

For this story I chose the photograph rather than the quotation.

With Gods On My Side

So what happened to the old Norse gods? Whither the Greek and Roman pantheon, the myriad local pagan deities of wood and water, starlight and love, upon the terrible rise of monotheism?

As belief waned, so did their power, and yet the gods being immortal have not died, but simply faded.
Many, embittered, are reduced to hiding car keys or making underwear ride up. The more malevolent deities have naturally gravitated toward bureaucracy and government.
Yet not all have fallen so low, for as I have discovered there live still the gods of joyous Misrule.

Hearken, dear reader.
The twin naiads, Capucine and Clothilde, have in recent years chosen to dwell in the window of a bookshop on the Quai de Valmy in Paris, overlooking the canal that joins the Bassin de Vilette to the Seine.
Their self-assigned rôle is to pluck a single thought from the mind of each passer-by, simultaneously replacing it with one from another person. Whether gift or curse depends upon their whim, one twin being good, the other evil.

I discovered their existence quite by chance when one evening I found myself in sudden and unaccountable possession of a passable facility with conversational Turkish. Retracing my steps toward the point of this revelation I observed the following: as people walked past a certain window their expressions changed, some to delight, others consternation, but most to momentary bafflement before they walked on.
The window merely displayed a selection of volumes on twentieth century art. From a certain angle, however, and fleetingly as if viewed through a blind spot, an image appeared of two girls in sylvan parkland, elegantly attired, masked and beautiful.

I was still reeling from this apparent trick of the light when a woman passed the window and to my horror, the twin apparitions appeared to reach inside her head.
It was only for an instant. The woman paused momentarily, her expression one of confusion as if losing her thread of thought, before regaining her composure and walking on as if nothing had happened.

From my vantage point on the canal path I stood transfixed, observing a dozen passers-by endure the same strange ritual. At last I could withstand the mystery no longer and crossed the street, determined to pass the window myself, to pause at that very spot and divine the truth.

I have since passed that window at every conceivable opportunity.
Their strength returning with my growing belief, the goddesses have favoured me, ridding my mind of clutter and junk, of painful or unwanted memories and redistributing them among a baffled population, replacing them in return with snippets and snatches of other people’s minds; their experiences, abilities, memories and emotions, their most intimate delights and desires.

I hereby bequeath my soul to the goddesses Capucine and Clothilde in the hope that upon my death all that is me; every last scintilla of my conscious and unconscious mind will be gifted, thought by thought, to the collective consciousness of Paris.
Heaven indeed.